vote

Gamifying life is silly, fun, and a great way to interact with those strangers who you pass everyday. Here’s one example that might just pop up along your next walk to work. It’s a way to take a very unscientific straw poll on any topic — you won’t even have to use your hands to cast a ballot.

A group called [Vote With Your Feet] has come up with a novel way of casting ballots. Simply walk down the sidewalk and through one of two doorways, each labeled with either side of a dichotomy. Each doorway is able to count the number of people that pass through it, so any issue imaginable can be polled. They already did vim vs emacs (59 to 27), and we’d like to see Keynes vs Hayek, or even Ovaltine vs Nesquik. Users can send the machine new issues for the masses to vote on, so the entertainment is quite literally limited only by your imagination.

The point of this art installation like this is to get people to interact with their environment in a novel way, which this project has accomplished exceptionally well. In 3 days, they registered over 10,000 votes which are viewable on their website. If you have a project in mind that calls for data visualization you might want to keep this in your back pocket.

Don’t forget to vote in the newest round of Astronaut or Not. In addition to deciding which projects should be recognized as “Too Cool for Kickstarter”, you will be eligible for the voter lottery.

What is this voter lottery we speak of? On Friday we’ll draw a random number and see if that hacker profile on Hackaday.io has voted at least once in this round, which started on Monday.

If they voted they’ll received a prize package packed with all kinds of prototyping hardware. This cycle offers several breakout boards, a bunch of programmers and debuggers, as well as a digital multimeter and a bench power supply (full list here). For the hackers who haven’t registered a vote? Nothing!

We’ll be drawing the number from a hotel room in Vegas since we’ll be there for DEFCON. If you’re also attending the conference track us down to show off your own hardware or just to grab some stickers.

Voter Lottery Prize:

How long have you been making do with a hacked together power supply?

Be sure you vote and you could kiss those days goodbye with this BK Precision 1760A bench supply. It has three channels; 0-30V 0-2A on the first two and 4-6.5V 0-5A on the third. We’re also throwing in some leads so that you can be up and running as soon as it arrives.

We’ll draw a random number on Friday morning. If you have voted at least one time in this current round (your participation in previous rounds doesn’t matter) and your hacker number is drawn you will win! But if your number is drawn and you haven’t voted… no bench supply for you.

You must vote at least once per round to be eligible. At the appointed time we’ll draw a random number and look up to see if that profile on Hackaday.io has voted. If so, winner winner (like the Rigol scope that was awarded last Friday). If not, no Bukito for you! This new round just started at the beginning of the week. Your vote quota has been restored, and we tweaked the interface to only show you each project once.

In addition to your own gain, you’re helping us choose which projects deserve a bit of swag. We’re one again sending shirts to the projects who rise to the top of the head-to-head gudgematch.

UPDATE: To clarify, you must vote in the current round to be eligible for the current voter lottery. Your participation in previous rounds has no bearing on the current round eligibility.

Check out the vote tally which [Alek] put together (click for a much larger version). We couldn’t be more delighted at how the first round of voting for Astronaut or Not went. With very nearly 50k votes it’s time to start another round.

This is an entirely new round. Your 30 votes have been restored and you must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery. The theme has also changed; vote for projects whose ideas are most likely to be used in other projects. That is to say: is there a core piece of cleverness that, properly explained and modularized, would be extremely extensible? Then vote for that one!

Links to the 15 winners are listed after the break; everyone on this list is getting a T-shirt and some stickers. The same will be true for the next round but we’re changing up the Voter Lottery prize — it’ll be similarly valuable and desirable but we’ll save details for this for Thursday. Make sure you vote or risk losing Friday’s lottery!

The Open Source Hardware (OSHW) initiative is rolling right along. But now it’s time for you to share your input. The movement is choosing a logo and you get to decide which one it will be. The ten finalists shown above were narrowed down from the 129 submissions received during the public call for logos. The thought is that any time you have a new project which fits the OSHW definition you can slap this on the project page, or silk screen it right on the PCB (although OSHW applies to more than just electronic projects). A picture says a thousand words you know.